The present invention relates to portable medical treatment systems, including a plurality of patient monitoring/treatment devices. More particularly, the invention relates to a patient care and treatment device capable of hosting a suite of medical monitoring/treatment modules useful to treat a patient and adaptable to function in various environments, including full service hospitals, field stations or in medical transport.
Many people suffer from injury and disease and require immediate medical attention. In many cases, an emergency response team is called to the patient's location for transport to a medical facility. The emergency response team may begin diagnosing and treating the patient for his injury or disease while en route. Although such a medical response is sufficient in most civilian applications, there may be extreme situations in which a traditional response is insufficient.
In the case of natural disasters and battlefield environments, patients may be located in remote, hard to reach locations. As such, lightweight, portable medical equipment is a high priority in order to provide prompt medical treatment and therapy. In addition, it may be necessary to carry the patient from the remote location to an evacuation vehicle for transport to a medical facility.
In other less hazardous environments, it is also useful to have portable medical devices that can easily be brought into use where the demand for medical attention may be beyond the levels that are supported by the number of dedicated operating or critical care rooms. Such cases may arise, for example, where a local hospital receives a large number of patients as a result of a transportation accident, or where the normal demands progressively increase beyond the existing capacity of a medical facility. As such, portable suites of medical monitoring/treatment devices are suitable for an expanding number of applications, both for emergency services and otherwise.
Contemporary medical response devices have typically included patient support platforms having an array of substantially off the shelf medical monitoring/treatment devices secured to or supported by the platform. In most cases such devices operate independently of each other, which is useful in minimizing the expense of integration and obtaining necessary approvals for marketing of such devices without the need for government certification of systems including devices substantially modified from their already approved condition.
However, while such contemporary systems offer certain economic advantages in reduced development costs, the resulting systems would likely suffer from many short-comings, such as wiring demands, difficulty in implementing simultaneous control over multiple functions, difficulties in supporting updates in various monitoring/treatment devices without modifying central processing and power distribution functions, and other factors affecting the simplicity, reliability and stability of the overall platform. Additionally, doctors and nurses may well find it easier to perform medical procedures using integrated displays and controls, rather than an array of separately functioning devices that may each have their own unique operational requirements, user interfaces and space requirements that may prove challenging to the medical personnel treating the patient.
It is further useful if such improvements to existing suites of medical monitoring/treatment devices can be implemented in a manner that facilitates environmental support of the patient and the devices, in a manner that is readily tailorable to the presence and location of medical monitoring/treatment modules, and the individual requirements thereof.
The present invention addresses the above requirements. As described more fully below, the present invention, in its various inventive aspects, provides a structure, architecture, and systems which cooperate to provide an integrated, reliable, multi-function suite of integrated devices that can be useful to implement a variety of medical functions and regimens that provide a high degree of patient support with a user friendly display and interface. As such, the present invention allows the extension of quality medical treatment to many applications where more rudimentary support was typically available.